


Breaking Up The Band

by LiuWoods



Category: Creepypasta - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 20:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21344233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiuWoods/pseuds/LiuWoods
Summary: Soulmates aren't relationships, they're forced bonds for the sake of health. Liu wants no part in the nonsense that destroyed his brother.(Soulmate AU, entirely of my own creation)
Relationships: Tobias Erin "Toby" Rogers | Ticci Toby/Liu Woods | Homicidal Liu
Kudos: 31





	Breaking Up The Band

With two fingers, Liu tugs on the band encircling his wrist. It hurts, clinging to his skin as though by static electricity, but no, that’d be far more logical than the truth.

_Soulmates_. He cringes at the thought. The grotesque, forced pairing makes fora grim dystopia everyone around him just takes in stride. He’d spoken to his brother about it, back when _his_ band had first emerged.

It hadn’t taken Jeff long to meet his S_oulmate_, because he was driven to agony the day it emerged. He’d been bullied, because his emergence occurred so young. Only fourteen, far too young to be banded, barely even aware of the procedures involved in bonding.

It was the boy who was in love with him that did it.

Randy, who’d been somewhat obsessed with him for the better part of a year, who Jeff didn’t like to spend too much time with. He’d known more than most kids their age, and he’d decided, for some reason, that Jeff’s band must be the match to his.

Relationships were never a good idea. Liu had never heard of a single couple surviving an emergence. Dating was for teens and LEMs - Late Emergers - those who hadn’t had their future decided for them by a fact of biology.

See, you’re born with the band, and it isn’t _too_ much of a problem at first. You can feel it if you press on the skin, and it’ll sort of shift if you push too hard, but on a whole, it’s largely inoffensive, until the day it grows out of you.

Emergence usually took a year or two, and then it becomes a glorified bracelet, flesh coloured and weirdly flexible. You can wedge a finger under it but never all the way through, and it hurt, because it’s a part of you.

Some people never meet their soulmate, maybe the person died, or lived in another country, and those people’s lives were a kind of agony, public shame at being one of the _unbonded_, not to mention the pain.

Having an emerged band was bearable, for a brief amount of time. It depended on your pain tolerance, really. Most people could handle it for five years, a decade if they were pushing it, but there were outliers in both directions. Some of the emerged were pained to the point of disability, others could manage their lives perfectly with only a passing wince when they accidentally tugged on it.

The pain was a motivator, driving you to find your soulmate, who would hopefully be driven to you, too. When you met them, when you initiated physical contact, your bands would be shed, falling away easily, and it would free you, so long as you kept the person close. Living together was a must, because eight hours of sleep that wasn’t in close proximity would put you at risk of Scarring. It took about ten for Scarring to begin, and repeated scarring meant Entropy, a new band forming, this one made of rot and decay, blackened, painful, and irreversible.

Randy had been certain he was Jeff’s Soulmate, despite all of the known information about the system, despite the fact that soulmate bands emerged simultaneously and he was barely at the stage of bumping, despite the fact that he’d touched Jeff before while doing schoolwork. He’d grabbed Jeff at the bus stop, a few mornings after the day he emerged, sleeve pulled down over the band in an attempt to hide it, but Randy had caught a glimpse when he’d dropped something and extended his arm to pick it up.

Randy had gripped Jeff’s wrist so hard it must have seared, burning like hot oil against his skin. Nothing had happened, of course, neither lost their bands, but Randy didn’t let go. He shoved his fingers as hard as he could under the loosened circlet and wouldn’t stop, even when Jeff was screaming and Liu was trying to shove his way between them.

Jeff’s screams echoed through the park behind them, Randy digging his nails in and yelling things Liu couldn’t parse, too focused on trying to yank him away from his younger brother. He managed to get a good punch in, enough to send Randy staggering backwards, followed it with a hard shove, but Jeff was still screaming, shaking and holding his band with tense white fingers. Liu pulled him into his arms and hauled him towards home.

Jeff never recovered. It was days before he was able to sit and be still, multiple doctors visits. It wasn’t common for incidents like this to occur, and definitely not to this severity. The doctors noted grimly to Liu and their mother that Jeff might not survive, that he’d either be driven to insanity by the searing pain, or would die from it, offering no potential solution outside of finding his soulmate as soon as possible.

They’d never had time to look. When Liu went to check on Jeff that evening, he’d found an empty bed. The story they heard, from Jane, was that Jeff had broken into houses, following his pain, but it was distorted. He’d injured many people as a result of false alarms as the agony ebbed and flowed without reason, none of them successful, until he’d found her.

He killed her family, when he entered her home. It had been an unfortunate combination of his waning grip on reality and the trauma from the attack from Randy, but Jane’s father had put his hands on Jeff in a way that brushed too close, and Jeff snapped. He’d nearly thrown Jane across the room when she came downstairs, but the second his hand met the skin of her collarbone, it all cleared.

The pain-induced haze in his eyes, the sensory flashback he had been lost in, and the band, the source of all of it, released from his arm.

Jane’s had fallen too, of course, because that was how it worked. They met for the first time, the corpse of her father across the room, Jeff’s face wearing his blood, and the moment they touched they were bonded.

Fourteen, and bound, for your entire lifetime, to the boy who murdered your father. And Jane could barely manage to hate him for it. She knew the amount of pain he was in, and besides, it couldn’t be helped. Your _soulmate_ was decided by the fates, and they would need to spend the rest of their lives together. She despised him, she felt sick every time she looked at him, but she brought him home to his family, and she stayed with him.

Liu had gotten a sister from all of this, but had never quite recovered his brother, never fully retrieved him from inside of his guilt.The guilt that drove him mad, that caused him to deform his own face, the trauma that allowed him to snap back into that pain, even though it was physically gone. The slightest bump to his (could you call it Entropied? It was unprecedented for a band to see as much damage as his had) wrist would sear so badly that he entered a psychotic state, on one occasion, so bad that he attacked Liu, who’d fallen asleep on the couch.

The facial scarring didn’t bother him. He didn’t care, they just added to his apathy towards living this life, as he sat on the train and stared at the band on his wrist. He’d been 17 when Jeff’s attack happened, was 22 now, and no closer to finding, or wanting to find, his soulmate. He barely noticed the pain, a dull throbbing, and he had no interest in it.

The only thing that kept him from just doing away with himself, was the knowledge that his soulmate might have worse pain. The thought of what happened to his brother. He couldn’t inflict that upon someone else. He’d just have to wait it out.

If you’d asked him how he thought he would lose his band, his answer would not have been ‘halfway through a stifled yawn, extended shoulder bumping into the man sitting beside him on the train.’ It was ridiculous.

He stared at his suddenly bare wrist, turning to look at the man sitting beside him, who looked far too calm and unbothered beneath his large orange glasses.

"Huh. Guess that's that." 

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, this lore is a lot but bear with me.


End file.
